Pump and Dump

The P&D scam was completely new to me until a few weeks ago when I started
getting a load of backscatter from a scammer - mail bounces coming to
randomly generated user names (typically 3 to 5 random characters) at my
domain. The originating IPs of the scam mails appears to indicate a number
of bots located around the world, mostly South Korea, Latin America and
Texas(!), with a few in Germany.

I have researched some of the P&D companies and one is apparently a
microscopic oil company located in Canada. There are only 39 share holders
and the company appears to consist of one guy - the 'CEO'. The share price
has increased by 44% recently.

My questions are therefore -

1. Is P&D actually illegal or is it a case of 'caveat emptor'?

2. If it is illegal then where would you make a report? Given that there
appear to be only 39 possible beneficiaries in this company it shouldn't be
too hard to trace the scammer.

3. At the end of the day would anyone actually follow this up or would I be
wasting my time? The scammer may make a few bucks but he won't be retiring
on the proceeds of this one.


An additional question - can you confirm that Spamcop encourages reporting
the mail bounces themselves as spam? I've seen this suggestion a few times
on the forums. Originally I was just annoyed by the scammer but the
frequency of the incorrectly bounced mail is not decreasing and I'm actually
getting more fed up with mail servers that are incapable of recognising a
spoofed return address.

As an aside - you wouldn't believe how many people out there send
out-of-office autoresponses in reply to mail originating from outside their
local networks... or maybe you would.  :-)

Thanks
Andy